UNFINISHED HISTORIES - Key Persons
Jessica's theatre work has embraced the roles of director, producer, voice coach, actor, singer, composer and musical director.
She studied flute, singing and piano at the Royal College of Music as a Junior Exhibitioner and went on to study acting at Mountview Theatre School. She worked for many years as an actor, singer, composer and musical director in the West End, London Fringe, national and small-scale touring, and Theatre-in-Education.
In 1976 with Gerard Bell and Bryony Lavery, she founded Les Oeufs Malades which produced the early plays of Bryony Lavery in London and nationally. Further work with Bryony Lavery was as actor/composer in the 1980s political cabaret The Wandsworth Warmers at the Drill Hall, Piccadilly Theatre and National Theatre.
In 1984 Jessica Higgs co-founded Signs of Life Theatre Company with director Paddy Taylor presenting a double-bill of plays by the experimental, feminist American playwright Joan Schenkar (Fulfilling Koch's Postulate and Cabin Fever), followed by Waiting for Maria by Judith Scott at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill. Waiting for Maria went on to play at Theatre Workshop as part of the 1988 Edinburgh Festival. Jessica acted in and composed the music for both productions.
In 1984 Jessica was asked to compose the music for Kenneth Branagh's Romeo and Juliet at the Lyric, Hammersmith. She went on to compose music for Lin Coghlan's, A Feeling in My Bones (Theatre Centre) and Rattlin' the Cage (Half Moon YPT), Diane Samuel's, Turncoat (Theatre Centre) and Lisa Evan's, Slap! (Humberside YPT). In 1989 Jessica worked as assistant musical director on Gay Sweatshop's Paradise Now and Then by Noel Greig and Richard Coles. From this she formed the lesbian and gay Paradise Choir which she ran and conducted until 1992.
In 1990 Jessica studied on the specialist Voice Studies course at Central School of Speech and Drama (CSSD) and since then has worked extensively as a freelance voice coach in theatre, film and actor training. Production work includes: Salisbury Playhouse, Bolton Octagon, Mercury Colchester, Soho Theatre, Barbican, Royal Court, Mamma Mia! in the West End, Hallmark Films and the BBC. Training: The Poor School, Central School of Speech and Drama, Mountview Theatre School, Northampton University, City Lit, Actors Centre and for several London based American colleges. She works regularly at BADA (British-American Drama Academy) and at CSSD.
In 2000 Jessica established her own company, In Tandem TC, so titled because it is the company's policy to work in tandem with those who are the subject of the work being developed. To date, the company have produced a double bill of Harold Pinter's Mountain Language and Landscape performed in British Sign Language (BSL) with Deaf and hearing actors and the British premiere of Smudge, by Canadian playwright, Alex Bulmer (both nominated Time Out's Critics Choice); developed kin'a'hora, a performance piece looking at Anglo-Jewish identity with spoken word poet, Leah Thorn, subsequently made into a short film My Amulet and premiered at the 2008 UK Jewish Film Festival; and has been developing with French-African actor Aicha Kossoko, a Black cast version of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days. Jessica has directed all the work thus far. The company's Unfinished Histories collaboration with Susan Croft began after Jessica had attended Susan's inaugural event at the Theatre Museum in 2006. In 2012 In Tandem TC became Unfinished Histories Ltd.
As a freelance director her work includes: Four Portraits - Of Mothers (Arnold Wesker, Bridewell Theatre), Lady Gray (Will Eno, Soho Theatre), Pig Tales (Julie McNamara, Jackson's Lane, National & International tours), Pig's Sister (Julie McNamara, Theatre Workshop Edinburgh Festival), The Playboy of the Western World (J.M.Synge, Workhouse Theatre), Red Riding Hood (Soho Community Group), Signs #1 (devised BSL play, co-directed with Paula Garfield, Sallis Benney Brighton), In No Particular Order (Clare Summerskill, National tour) and Unfinished Histories' rehearsed reading of Jane Arden's Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven at the Tonybee Studios, November 2009.
More recently, Jessica, has directed writer/storyteller Yang-May Ooi in her sell-out solo show Bound Feet Blues in 2015 and Janet Behan in her double bill Realtine/Noreen in 2016 as part of Camden Fringe 2016, both at the Tristan Bates Theatre. Most recent work has been with Lyndsey Jones, Clare Jones and Julia Collier on Sex, Spies and Streaming at the Hen and Chickens as part of Camden Fringe 2017 and Sherine Chalhie's Hijabi Matters at Ovalhouse, March 2019.
Jessica's work with Disability arts has been extensive and pioneering. As well as her own work with In Tandem TC, she has been a mentor, trainer and director with Graeae Theatre including work on The Changeling and Diary of an Action Man. She has also worked as voice consultant with Deafinitely Theatre (BSL and English). Her work in disability arts has led to invitations to speak at: What is theatre? LIFT 2004 Enquiry (Barge House, London South Bank); Changing the Scene - performance and creative access in theatre for and by visually impaired people (Royal National Theatre,2004); and Inclusion in Training & Performance for Disabled Actors (RADA,2003).
Jessica has been a theatre assessor for the Arts Council and Shell Connections at the National Theatre.
Job Titles:
- Website Technical Manager
Susan is a writer, curator, dramaturg, arts/performance archive consultant and historian with special interests in women playwrights, black and Asian theatre in Britain, live art and new writing for performance …as well as alternative theatre generally.
Susan studied English and American and Commonwealth Arts at Exeter University where she was introduced to the alternative theatre movement by Peter Thompson's programmes at St Luke's College, featuring companies like Joint Stock, Lumiere and Son, Monstrous Regiment, Foco Novo, Les Oeufs Malades, Incubus and Avon Touring. She then went on a direct exchange scholarship to the US to study International Theatre Studies, where amongst others she worked with Zbigniew Cynkutis of Grotowski's Teatr Laboratorium.
She went on to join the Omaha Magic Theatre, an experimental troupe set up by JoAnn Schmidman and Megan Terry, who had worked with Joseph Chaikin's Open Theatre in New York and wanted to apply similar practices of creating theatre in a more ‘authentic' community. It was a fascinating experience: as a company member Susan helped devise both site-specific and touring shows, edited the company's newspaper and helped with admin - and performed on tours all over the Midwest to isolated rural communities, cities, Indian reservations and prisons.
On her return to Britain, at the height of Thatcherite unemployment she worked with Bread and Puppet Theatre on their procession for the major anti-nuclear demonstration in late 1983 and then joined, The Witkacy Ensemble in Colchester, a profit-share company devoted to the work of Polish playwright Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. Oddly there were no profits… Moving to London she trained with SHAPE in running drama workshops for people with special needs, served on the editorial collective of the short-lived magazine of alternative theatre The Plot, became an active member of the campaigning group Women in Entertainment and involved in the Half Moon Theatre's actors workshop, while reading scripts for a number of theatres.
In 1985 she was invited to contribute her specialist knowledge of women playwrights as a member of the working committee of the GLC's London Young Playwrights Festival and the following year set up New Playwrights Trust (later Writernet) in response to the demand of those attending for a support body. The organisation prioritised encouraging and setting up initiatives new playwrights generally but particularly those experimenting with new forms and those from groups under-represented in the theatre, such as a directory of black playwrights, in conjunction with Black Audio-Visual Collective. She also worked with numerous small-scale alternative companies, matching writers to companies and advising on working processes. She also jointly set up the Second Wave Young Women Playwrights' Project at the Albany Empire in Deptford. Alongside work at NPT she worked on several performance projects including developmental work on new writing with the Soho Poly and dramaturgical work on The Magdalena Project's Nominatae Filiae and also attended the major International Women Playwrights conference in Buffalo, New York.
In 1989 she left NPT to take up a post as Lecturer in Creative Arts (Performance) at Nottingham Trent University, teaching performance writing, performance studies and practical, and arts administration on this major interdisciplinary arts degree, while also programming the Powerhouse season of experimental theatre and organising several conferences. She also worked as dramaturg with the experimental theatre company Meeting Ground led by Tania Myers and Stephen Lowe, on projects with Polish director Zofia Kalinska. Her research at this time led to the publication of essays on black women playwrights in Britain and women's experimental theatre (see below). She spent a year doing research towards the major project of a critical bibliography of published women playwrights in English up to 1914.
She then went to Manchester Metropolitan University as Senior Research Fellow in Performance Arts in 1993, working on another interdisciplinary arts degree, where she led the departmental research initiative and commissioned Michael McMillan to produce the report Live Writing: Explorations in Training, with Arts Council funding and set up various initiatives on archiving and documenting performance. In 1996 she went to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre on an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship to pursue her work on women playwrights.
In late 1997 she joined the Theatre Museum as Curator of Contemporary Performance where she worked to improve the Museum's archiving of the alternative theatre sector and helped develop the audio and video collections including the National Video Archive of Performance. She curated a series of major exhibitions including Exploding Tradition on the designer Tania Moiseiwitsch, Architects of Fantasy, both a retrospective exhibition/installation by Forkbeard Fantasy and an exploration of large-scale puppetry and animations in British theatre and carnival, The Redgraves: a Family on the Public Stage and Let Paul Robeson Sing! The last was part of a series of initiatives to highlight the Museum's holdings on Black and Asian theatre which also included Black Theatre History Trails, displays on Ira Aldridge and the publication Black and Asian Performance at the Theatre Museum: a Users' Guide. She also curated displays on Unity Theatre, community plays and censorship among others and ran events from jointly organising a symposium on street arts to readings of eighteenth century women playwrights.
Since 2005 she has been freelance, writing and editing various books and working on a range of projects including women's suffrage-related work including a centenary celebration of the Actresses Franchise League, a related web site and exhibition: How the Vote Was Won and a new edition of suffrage plays. She was commissioned to conduct the Society for Theatre Research survey and report on Oral Histories of Theatre. In 2007 she was awarded her PhD from University of East Anglia on Re-writing the Record: Women's History as Playwrights. She set up the initial Unfinished Histories projects with Jessica Higgs in 2006, following an event of the same name at the Theatre Museum. From 2008 to 2018 she was attached to Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance as Clive Barker Visiting Research Fellow, focused on developing their archives, researching and creating access initiatives around them see TheatreFutures. During the 2020-21 pandemic she set up the blog Her Inside: Women in the Lockdown as well as the Unfinished Histories online playreading group. and also began compiling resources to raise awareness of work on Black and Minority Ethnic theatre history on the Unfinished Histories site and elsewhere. She lives in London with her partner and two children.